The Independence Day holiday is not always a three-day weekend, but when it is, it’s my favorite weekend.
One reason is fireworks, one of the lesser known fields of endeavor that has seen tremendous advancements over the years.
We decided to watch, schedules and weather and so on permitting, as much in fireworks as we could get to over the next few days. There were fireworks Friday, there are fireworks Saturday through Monday, and there is even a display Tuesday night. (Which we were going to until a wave of illness and fatigue hit the house.)
Our fireworks odyssey starts with these photos Michael took at the Waushara County Fairgrounds in Wautoma Friday:
On Saturday, we went to Princeton (where we once went hoping the booms would induce labor):
On Sunday we went to Murray Park in Ripon:
On Independence Day, we saw the Fond du Lac fireworks from a distance:
I was trying to figure out what to write for the United States of America’s 235th birthday.
And then the answer fell from the sky onto our sidewalk.
It was a piece of fireworks, shot from a birthday party a couple houses north of ours. It was preceded by a big bang, followed by a louder boom.
Those who watched this week’s Ripon Channel Report know that state law prevents use of fireworks that launch or explode — firecrackers, Roman candles, bottle rockets and mortars — without a permit. Even though they’re legal to buy in this state, they’re not legal to use in this state.
What sort of twisted logic makes an item legal to purchase but not use? The same logic that bans smoking in all public places (including privately owned businesses), yet doesn’t ban sale of tobacco products. That same logic pervades government at every level today, and is utterly foreign to any concept the Founding Fathers intended from either the Declaration of Independence, the original Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
It is fashionable today to ignore the origins of our country because we reflect poorly on those origins. President Obama‘s comments about whether the U.S. is exceptional or not were, well, misinterpreted, which was partly either his own fault or his speechwriter’s fault. But there is no question that some supporters of Obama do believe this country is nothing exceptional, such as those who try to enforce the “right” of public employee collective bargaining using the precedent of UN resolutions.
Remember, though, that the Founding Fathers noted our “inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” My “pursuit of happiness” was sitting in our front yard reading a World War II book (no “pursuit of happiness” in the first couple of years of the war, to be sure), while our neighbors’ pursuit of happiness was celebrating someone’s birthday.
Or perhaps they were rebelling against what you should think is a stupid law. Rebellion goes back before our existence as an independent country to the Boston Tea Party. Everyone who came (or now comes) to this immigrant country by choice came here because they thought their lives would be better here, however they defined “better,” than wherever they left.
Our founding fathers recognized the concept of Natural Law; a set of universal rights and responsibilities endowed to us by our Creator that precedes any governments we might form for the purposes of protecting and enforcing them. Numbers 5-10 of the Ten Commandments are sufficient for us to live in peace with each other, and most of us instinctively follow them, whether or not we believe in the God of the first four.
When six is the upper limit of our tolerance of things we will be told we can’t do, 2,000 pages of “shall” and “shall not” don’t stand a chance. We are Americans; we don’t do “shall.” That seems so obvious.
Americans are the perfected DNA strand of rebelliousness. Each of us is the descendant of the brother who left the farm in the old country when his mom and dad and wimpy brother told him not to; the sister who ran away rather than marry the guy her parents had arranged for her; the freethinker who decided his fate would be his own, not decided by a distant power he could not name. How did you think we would turn out?
Those other brothers and sisters, the tame and the fearful, the obedient and the docile; they all stayed home. Their timid DNA was passed down to the generations who have endured warfare and poverty and hopelessness and the dull, boring sameness that is the price of subjugation.
They watch from the old countries with envy as their rebellious American cousins run with scissors. They covet our prosperity and our might and our unbridled celebration of our liberty; but try as they might they have not been able to replicate our success in their own countries.
Why? Because they are governable and we are not. The framers of the Constitution were smart enough not to try to limit our liberty; they limited government instead. …
Those who cling to the promise of government ignore its reality. Which side of liberty are you on – the Department of Energy side, or the Internet side? Which do you trust to deliver your prosperity – yourself or the government? Who owns you?
That is the question for our time. A self-owned person is ungovernable; and ungovernable is our natural state. Liberty is our birthright, and prosperity is its reward.
Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution were perfect documents. Both were written in an era in which the term “all men are created equal” applied only to white property-owning men. And yet the presence of those five words paved the eventual path to the elimination of slavery and the extension of full rights to non-white men and to women.
I argued in the previous blog that the Constitution needs an economic Bill of Rights similar to what economist Milton Friedman proposed, limiting government spending and its ability to tax, mandating sound money, and opening borders and trade. (That last position has become increasingly unpopular since 9/11, and I wonder what Friedman would have had to say about open borders today.) Friedman believed that economic freedom was part of political freedom, and the Declaration of Independence is certainly about economic freedom as well.
Economic and personal freedom are interdependent, as Victor Davis Hansen points out:
Yet there has never been any nation even remotely similar to America. Here’s why. Most revolutions seek to destroy the existing class order and use all-powerful government to mandate an equality of result rather than of opportunity — in the manner of the French Revolution’s slogan of “liberty, equality and fraternity” or the Russian Revolution’s “peace, land and bread.”
In contrast, our revolutionaries shouted “Don’t tread on me!” and “Give me liberty or give me death!” The Founders were convinced that constitutionally protected freedom would allow the individual to create wealth apart from government. Such enlightened self-interest would then enrich society at large far more effectively that could an all-powerful state.
Such constitutionally protected private property, free enterprise and market capitalism explain why the United States — with only about 4.5 percent of the world’s population — even today, in an intensely competitive global economy, still produces a quarter of the world’s goods and services. To make America unexceptional, inept government overseers, as elsewhere in the world, would determine the conditions — where, when, how and by whom — under which businesses operate.
Individual freedom in America manifests itself in ways most of the world can hardly fathom — whether our unique tradition of the right to gun ownership, the near impossibility of proving libel in American courts, or the singular custom of multimillion-dollar philanthropic institutions, foundations and private endowments. Herding, silencing or enfeebling Americans is almost impossible — and will remain so as long as well-protected citizens can say what they want and do as they please with their hard-earned money.
That part about “herding, silencing or enfeebling Americans” would be a good description of what the instigators and participants in Protestarama would accuse the state GOP of doing to their alleged constitutional rights to hold up the taxpayers for billions of dollars — I mean, take away public employees’ collective bargaining.
(Billions of dollars, you say? Do the math: The average state employee costs the state $71,000 in salary and benefits. The state has about 69,000 FTEs. Multiply, and the state spends about $4.899 billion every year on state employee salaries and benefits.)
The recall elections are a perfect example of the political left’s contempt for our republic, as in the decisions made by our duly elected officials. (As if we’ve needed evidence for that since the Vietnam War.) Democrats swept every statewide office except one in the 2006 election, and captured control of both houses of the Legislature in 2008. What did Republicans do? They found candidates, generated money for their campaign spending, and persuaded the voters to vote most Democrats out of office in 2010. And like a petulant two-year-old, those whose side lost Nov. 2 refuse to understand that they lost and why they lost. They also fail to grasp that, should their candidates win in the recall elections in August, the GOP will certainly redouble their efforts to make their political careers last 17 months. (Two can play the same game, as Sens. Dave Hansen, James Holperin and Robert Wirch are finding out.)
However, our republican form of government does not guarantee us political happiness. It doesn’t guarantee political tranquility either. Nor does it guarantee a job, government-provided health care, nice weather, etc., etc., etc. Ben Franklin’s answer to the woman who asked what had been created — “a Republic, if you can keep it” — applies today, and it will apply tomorrow and every other day this country continues to exist. And regardless of what you may think about Protestarama, it still doesn’t rise to the level of the Federalist vs. Democratic–Republican battles, or for that matter the Civil War.
Still, after reading this, you may need evidence that America is really an exceptional place. I pass on a story from Ambassador to Tanzania Mark Green (former state legislator and Congressman from Green Bay), who tells the story of an Independence Day celebration at the embassy in 2008, when Tanzania’s Minister for Home Affairs, a Georgetown University law school graduate, spoke after Green:
After a few brief sentences thanking us for the evening and for the opportunity to speak, he scanned his audience, seeming to single out the Americans with his eyes. He paused again, and as he did, he suddenly seemed to relax . . .the formality of his position melted away.
“What I would say to you tonight is simply this: we want to have what you have. We want to be who you are.”
This being Independence Day, you wouldn’t think there would be many music anniversaries today. I love this one, though: WOWO radio in Fort Wayne, Ind., celebrated the nation’s 153rd birthday by burning its transmitter to the ground.
Independence Day 1970 was not a holiday for Casey Kasem, who premiered “America’s Top 40”:
Birthdays (besides non-rockers Stephen Foster and Louis Armstrong) include Bill Withers:
Al “Blind Owl” Wilson of Canned Heat was born the same day …
… as Dave Rowberry of the Animals:
Jeremy Spencer of the blues incarnation of Fleetwood Mac:
Ralph Johnson played drums for Earth Wind & Fire:
Kirk Pengilly of INXS:
Finally, an American rock fan must play this today:
An interesting anniversary considering what tomorrow is: Today in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling punishing WBAI radio in New York City for broadcasting George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. (If you click on the link, remember, you’ve been warned.)
Birthdays begin with Fontella Bass:
Damon Harris of the Temptations:
The late Laura Brannigan:
Stephen Pearcy of Ratt:
Taylor Dayne:
Two notable deaths happened today: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who contributed, according to Wikipedia, “guitars, sitar, keyboards, accordion, marimba, harmonica, dulcimer, autoharp, percussion, recorder, cello, mandolin, saxophone, [and] backing vocals,” drowned in his swimming pool …
… two years before Jim Morrison of The Doors died in Paris of a heart attack.
This being Independence Day weekend, which is one of the major vacation/trip weekends, it seems appropriate to bring up a former American automaker with deep Wisconsin roots.
Hot Rod magazine committed one of the great April Fool’s jokes in the history of magazine publishing when it breathlessly reported in its April 2008 issue that a group of private investors were working to bring back the late American Motors Corp. (The disclaimer at the beginning of the Web page didn’t appear until the last paragraph of the printed version.)
As with any successful practical joke, this one worked because of the appearance of plausibility. Given that the 2008 Ford Mustang looked like the 1967–68 Mustang, and given that Chrysler resurrected the Dodge Challenger and General Motors Corp. brought back the Chevrolet Camaro, is it possible that someone might want to resurrect the AMC Pacer …
… or, even better, the Javelin?
First, some history: AMC, the child of the marriage of the Nash and Hudson brands, was the smallest member of the Big Four automakers, until Chrysler purchased it in 1987 to get the Jeep brand into the Chrysler fold. AMC’s corporate headquarters were in the Detroit area, but its cars were built in Kenosha and Milwaukee (a Nash plant built in 1901).
AMC first had a reputation for building compact cars, such as the Rambler, in an era in which compact cars were only sporadically popular. One of AMC’s presidents was Gerald Romney, a later governor of Michigan and Republican presidential candidate, and father of presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Having much less capital than its bigger three competitors, AMC nonetheless built some cars that were ahead of their time, thanks in large part to the work of chief stylist Richard Teague. The company first took its sporty Javelin, chopped off the rear end …
… and created the two-seat AMX, a cult car among collectors today.
A couple years later, AMC took its compact Hornet, similarly sliced off the rear end …
Whoever thought of adding four-wheel-drive to the compact Concord (born as the aforementioned Hornet 10 years earlier) created the Eagle, America’s first crossover sport utility (car with four-wheel-drive-truck-like capabilities), predating the Subaru Outback and other all-wheel-drive-equipped cars by 15 years.
Then, in 1983, came the downsized Jeep Cherokee, the first sport utility not based on a full-size pickup truck. An AMC subsidiary, AM General, began work in the late 1970s on something the U.S. Army called the “High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle” — which, two owners and a marketing agreement with General Motors later, the world came to know as the Hummer.
Other AMC cars were not great cars, but at least they stood out on the street, such as the Marlin …
… which arguably looked better as the Tarpon show car, based on a smaller model than the Marlin ended up being …
… the aforementioned Gremlin and …
… the final two-door and four-door versions of the Matador. Like the Pacer, the Matador coupe was in a class of one, while the last four-door Matador was referred to as “coffin-nose.” AMC seemed to have two kinds of styling: staid and really out there.
Of course, AMC had long history with, shall we say, interesting-looking large cars. The Hudson Hornet, which detractors said looked like an upside-down bathtub with wheels …
… was, in the not-intended-as-a-compliment words of car magazine editor David E. Davis Jr., resurrected as the early 1990s Chevrolet Caprice:
On the other hand, the aforementioned Hornet (which you’ve seen if you’ve seen the movie “Cars”) was also an example of AMC’s ability to do more with less. Despite having just a six-cylinder engine, the Hornet was one of the dominant cars of the early years of NASCAR, thanks to its lower center of gravity from said upside-down-bathtub design, and the heavily-breathed-upon six.
The car I wish AMC had brought out would have been the replacement for the AMX when it was merged into the Javelin line (which meant the AMX wouldn’t have just two seats anymore) was …
… the AMX/3, a mid-engine/rear-drive halo car designed in Italy but with an AMC 390 V-8. I have a 1970 issue of Popular Mechanics that includes the AMX/3 as one of AMC’s 1971 offerings. The AMX/3 was unveiled one day after Lincoln–Mercury unveiled its De Tomaso Pantera, and that supposedly scared off AMC. (The Pantera didn’t last long either, which is too bad; while I should favor Ford since, unlike GM and Chrysler, it received no government aid, Ford also doesn’t have anything like the Corvette either.)
AMC and its predecessors also had a history of some unusual design and engineering decisions. Early 1960s Ramblers had push-button shifting for its automatic transmissions. On the other hand, AMC for some reason thought it would be innovative to remove the zeros from speedometers, making them read from 0 to 12 instead of 0 to 120 mph. To get the most out of one steering wheel design, the steering wheel was mounted upside down on the Gremlin and Hornet models. The last Javelin’s air conditioning controls required the owner to read the owner’s manual more than once — one slide controlled the fan, one controlled the heat, one controlled the outlets from which the air blew, and the last was for the air-conditioned air, including a “Desert Only” setting, prolonged use of which, owners were warned, could lead to loss of cool air due to coolant freezing.
One unusual AMC niche was in police cars. Anyone who watched “Adam-12,” “The Rockford Files” or “The Dukes of Hazzard” (I plead guilty to all three — any series with cool cars got my attention) might remember that those series all featured Matador police cars. Many law enforcement agencies used Matadors because they probably were less expensive than their Big Three competition. (I once saw a sign in a National Guard armory that reminded everyone that all of their equipment was produced by the lowest bidder.) I don’t remember seeing Matador police cars in Wisconsin, but for several years in the early ’70s the Wisconsin State Patrol used Ambassador squad cars. So did a few sheriff’s departments, including Dane County, at least until a well-publicized spat between either AMC or the Madison AMC dealer and the sheriff over sheriff’s deputies’ habit of crashing said Ambassadors. (The dealership, from which we purchased a 1973 Javelin (read further), is still in business today, though it sells used cars now.) The Alabama Highway Patrol and the Muskego police used Javelins for a while.
The Nash+Hudson=AMC merger came right after Studebaker and Packard merged, which lasted only until 1966, when Studebaker–Packard closed its Hamilton, Ont., plant, two years after it closed its South Bend, Ind., plant. Studebaker and AMC apparently were talking about merging before AMC president George Mason, well, died in 1954. That put Romney in charge of AMC, and Romney was opposed to using Studebaker parts, and that ended the merger idea. Which seems too bad, given that StudePackAMC might have had enough brands to compete with every Big Three brand, from Nash at the Chevrolet/Ford/Plymouth level to Packard at the Cadillac/Lincoln/Chrysler level. (As owners of Plymouths, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Mercurys — Mercuries? — and Saturns know, that wouldn’t have been sustainable long-term, but one crisis at a time.)
There are conflicting schools of thought as to why AMC finally folded with its purchase by Chrysler. Patrick Foster, author of American Motors: The Last Independent, argues that AMC did fairly well in the 1960s, offering economical (for the day), sturdily built, stolid cars (similar to Mercedes-Benz in the day), until AMC management decided it needed to offer what the other members of the Big Four were offering — sporty cars (although the Javelin was quite successful in the Trans Am series) and big cars, products where AMC lacked the ability to compete with GM, Ford and Chrysler.
I maintain that the reason AMC doesn’t exist today as an independent manufacturer has to do with a decision the company made during the early 1970s to discontinue building its Javelin “pony car.” Chevrolet built many more Camaros and Ford built many more Mustangs than AMC built Javelins, but the Javelin and its AMX two-seat cousin developed a reputation as race cars whose performance exceeded their reputation. The last year of the Javelin was 1974, just before the pony car market exploded and General Motors sold as many Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds as they could build.
This (minus the vinyl roof, and the horses, and my parents didn’t look like that) was our 1973 Javelin, our first new second car. It was also the first car I drove on public roads. It had a 304 V-8, automatic transmission with floor shifter (first I’d ever seen in a car), bucket seats and console, power steering (but not brakes), and AM radio. It was a cool-looking car from the front seats forward, with a back seat suitable only for dolls, and a trunk large enough for the spare tire and a golf bag, and that’s it.
The Javelin was an example of AMC’s less-than-sterling quality reputation, although to be fair many ’70s cars were similarly lacking. The gold tape stripe on the side started cracking seconds after the 12-month 12,000-mile warranty expired. The car started rusting shortly thereafter, although rust on a brown car is easier to not notice. Even at age 8 I could tell that things didn’t seem to fit together that well. Most of the interior screws were dislodged after a Boy Scout camping trip in which the camping spot was at the end of a rough gravel road.
The Javelin was killed after the 1974 model year. Instead of the Javelin (and the luxury Ambassador, killed at the same time), AMC built …
… the Pacer, a car that was small in length, but wider and thus roomier (or so AMC wanted the consumer to believe) than the average small car. It was, however, heavy for its length due to big windows and slow yet fuel-inefficient even for that time, and, as the New York Times put it, it “looked like nothing else on the road,” a plus perhaps only in the minds of Wayne and Garth.
With AMC lacking money, 25 percent of AMC was sold to Renault (leading to the AMC Alliance and Fuego) before Chrysler purchased all of AMC in 1987. Chrysler closed the Milwaukee manufacturing plant in 1988, and closed the Kenosha plant (which was being used to build Chrysler engines) in 2008, just before GM closed its Janesville plant. (My family must be a curse upon carmakers, since our family’s garage simultaneously housed a Kenosha-built Javelin and a Janesville-built Chevrolet Caprice. My parents also owned two of the last Oldsmobiles, and my father owned a Studebaker Hawk many years ago. Someone should warn Cadillac, Subaru and Honda of this.)
Given how things for the remaining Big Three automakers today — as in GM owned by the taxpayers and Chrysler owned by Fiat — it’s hard to imagine how AMC could have made it to today had the sale to Chrysler not occurred. It is fun to contemplate, though, what could have happened had the“group of like-minded venture capitalists pooling billions of dollars to create the ultimate U.S. car company, and without the hindrance that comes with being a public company” been more than the figment of a creative writer’s imagination. That, however, would give the lie to the old saw that the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
Today in 1963, the Beatles recorded “She Loves You,” yeah, yeah, yeah:
Four years later, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” reached number one, and stayed there for 15 weeks:
Birthdays begin with Robert Byrd (no, not the older-than-dirt Ku Klux Klan member who became the senator from West Virginia), whom you may know better as Bobby Day:
Delaney Bramlett, of Delaney and Bonnie and Friends:
I have tried to avoid commenting on whatever happened between two members of the state Supreme Court June 13 until I could get an original take beyond:
Justice Prosser should resign.
Justice Bradley should resign.
Chief Justice Abrahamson should resign.
All of the above.
Before I begin: Proving that either it’s a small world or I’ve been around a long time, I have met most of the principals in this rasslin’ match. I have heard Shirley Abrahamson talk about what the Supreme Court does on a couple occasions, and although I don’t particularly care for her politics, I found her very personable, and she deserves credit for trying to show taxpayers what the Supreme Court does. (I also took a UW genetics class taught by her husband. For six weeks, until I concluded either I needed to drop the class, or I would fail the class.) I was at David Prosser’s victory party when he lost to Democrat Jay Johnson in the 1996 Eighth Congressional District election. (Victory parties by losing candidates are not much fun.) I have jousted with Bill Lueders, who broke the story Saturday, on Wisconsin Public Radio. I haven’t met Ann Walsh Bradley, but I have met her husband, Mark, who heads one of the state’s biggest law firms (as Marketplace Magazine readers know).
First point: The lack of criminal charges having been filed immediately after the incident means whatever happened did not rise to the level of criminal activity (i.e. assault or misdemeanor or felony battery charges). Neither Prosser nor Bradley will get awards for good workplace conduct or self-control, but ordinary police or sheriff’s departments are able to recommend charges to district attorneys sooner than two weeks after incidents take place. (Which makes one wonder why we have a Capitol Police Department.)
That brings to mind a second question: Who cares if Justice A cannot get along with Justice B? Regular readers know that I dabble in and have a broader interest in sports broadcasting. Over time, I have read rumors about how some nationally known sports broadcasters have a reputation for being difficult to work with. (Examples can be read in Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN. Or follow the career arc of Keith Olbermann of CNN, ESPN, Fox, MSNBC and, for now, Current TV.) And every such rumor makes me yawn, because I can think of no media consumer who cares whether the two news anchors get along, or if the editor and reporter don’t speak to each other, or if the radio show host and news person swear at each other off-microphone, or whatever — they care about what they are watching or listening to or reading, not the personalities on the other side of the fourth wall. Put it this way: I didn’t vote for Justice Prosser April 5 because of whether he got along with his coworkers.
Speaking of the media: It is not uncommon for the initial story (Prosser’s chokehold on Bradley) to be at odds with subsequent versions (Bradley lunged at Prosser first) of that same story. The former summarizes the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s first report, published online by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier Saturday; the second summarizes the story the Journal Sentinel’s own reporters did Saturday. Without the Internet, TV and radio (that is, those radio stations that actually have bodies in their newsrooms on weekends), the electronic media would have reported version one, and the newspapers would have reported version two Sunday.
Everyone must be a discerning media consumer, which is why it is important to point out that Lueders, who broke the story (or was given the story by Supreme Court sources), appears to have sources on only one side of the political spectrum willing to talk to him, based on his initial reporting. For its reputation as a liberal newspaper, the Journal Sentinel appears to have sources on both sides of the political spectrum willing to talk to them. Regardless of whether a reporter expresses his or her own opinions on the stories he or she covers, it is important to have enough credibility to be able to get information on all sides, not just the side that supports your own agenda.
To me, this is the state judicial recipe variation of the toxic cocktail that is politics at an increasing number of levels, and particularly in Wisconsin. (Even local, and if you don’t believe me, you should have been in Ripon around the last mayoral election. Or observe politics in Waukesha.) Background reporting about Prosser v. Bradley has demonstrated that the mid-June outburst was only the latest symptom of the festering feud between the liberal and conservative wings of the state Supreme Court.
Political observers have this gauzy idealism that the Supreme Court impartially judges the burning constitutional issues of the day. Not to call that view naïve, but if that was ever the case, it hasn’t been the case for decades. That is the fault of the judicial system as a whole, because over the past century or so the judicial system has increasingly legislated from the bench (for instance, Roe v. Wade, a bad decision regardless of how you feel about abortion rights) and taken on issues properly decided by the legislative branch. (However you feel about same-sex marriage, at least it was legalized by the legislative process in six states, not their courts.)
Everyone knows who are the conservatives (Prosser, Roggensack, Ziegler and Gableman), who are the liberals (Abrahamson and Bradley, who was marketed as a moderate when she was first named to the Supreme Court), and who is the turncoat (Crooks, who claimed to be a conservative when he lost to Bradley in 1995 and beat Court of Appeals Judge Ralph Adam Fine in 1996). And like everything else in politics, it is the result, only the result and nothing but the result that counts.
Regarding my multiple-choice question at the start of this blog: When a Supreme Court justice resigns before his or her term ends, the governor appoints a replacement (something to keep in mind for those espousing choice 1), but that replacement serves only until the next scheduled judicial election when no other justice is standing for election. If a justice were to resign today, the appointed replacement by Gov. Scott Walker would serve only until April 2012. And regarding choice 3, this irony: The Chief Justice in Wisconsin is the longest serving justice. Should Abrahamson resign, the next longest serving justice is … Bradley, elected in 1995. (Followed by Crooks; the three liberals are also the three longest serving justices.)
All of this is also another symptom of government’s increasing its tentacles into all aspects of our lives, which has increased the stakes in elections and the political process, which has increased political spending and nastiness of political campaigns and politics generally. Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus had two beliefs that seem contradictory today, but are not. On the one hand, he believed the federal government’s role was “defending our shores, delivering our mail and staying the hell out of our lives.” On the other hand, he also believed that “there are some questions the government has no business asking.” Unfortunately, neither side of the political aisle is following Dreyfus’ advice.
Here’s an odd anniversary: Four days after Cher divorced Sonny Bono, she married Gregg Allman. Come back to this blog in nine days to find out what happened next.
Birthdays start with Florence Ballard of the Supremes …
… born one year before Glenn Shorrock of the Little River Band:
Billy Brown, of Ray Goodman Brown:
Andrew Sweet, who is “Andy” in this famed ’70s song:
WRPN radio in Ripon (the AM station, not the Ripon College-owned FM station — yes, it occasionally gets confusing) performed a valuable public service earlier this month.
WRPN interviewed Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the statewide teacher union and the number one obstacle to improving education in a cost-effective manner in Wisconsin.
(Before we go on: Does this headline mean that I believe that Wisconsin teachers and non-teachers are on opposite sides? Certainly not. But given that teacher unions believe they speak for all their members, the phrase “guilt by association” comes to mind. Perhaps they’d prefer another acronym for WEAC I found on Facebook: “We Extort And Coerce.” And I am not comparing WEAC to the Mafia. One of WEAC’s members already did.)
Bell’s interview is interesting in that it provides insight into the mindset of teacher unions, the scourge of taxpayers, students and teachers who are actual professionals. Teacher unions, of course, treat their members, who have earned bachelor’s, master’s and even doctoral degrees, as the public-school equivalent of $10-an-hour laborers. (Here’s a tip: If a teacher is known more in a community for leading the teacher union and working in politics than for his teaching, he’s really not a teacher.)
Bell certainly didn’t back into the interview by beginning with niceties or local references. To an opening question about “how do we make schools a priority” (as if they’re not), Bell fired:
We want to make them a priority in terms of the positives and the things we know Wisconsin citizens have traditionally valued about their schools. You don’t do it by cutting budgets by nearly a billion dollars, but that’s what the Legislature has just done and the governor is about to sign. But you do it by saying these are the things that our communities want and need for their schools, these are the resources that are necessary, and we make that argument community by community, to the Legislature and the governor, that the direction they’re heading is not the direction that Wisconsin wants for its public schools.
It is absurd to assert that schools are not “a priority” when schools and public safety comprise more than half of the spending in the 2011–13 state budget. Note also the order in which Bell orders things: “these are the things that our communities want and need for their schools [and] these are the resources that are necessary,” instead of starting with what our state’s overtaxed taxpayers can afford. (“Affordability” appears to be as alien a concept to WEAC specifically and public employee unions generally as the word “conservative.”)
Note also Bell’s comment about making “that argument community by community.” One can infer from that that WEAC doesn’t want any state-mandated spending controls, which will force — the horror! — school districts to reduce property taxes in the next two fiscal years.
That “community by community” argument, which was the state approach until the state established two-thirds funding for schools in the 1990s, resulted in, for instance, three school districts in one county having the highest (more than $31 per $1,000 assessed valuation), eighth highest and 11 highest property tax mil rates in the entire state. (I was there.) Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus was fond of quoting his favorite iteration of the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Accept more state money, accept the rules that go along with it.
Bell talked about how WEAC has worked with the superintendent of public instruction (now there’s a real taxpayer watchdog) and “a number of other organizations” on …
… other ways to adequately fund our public schools, to focus the money where it’s needed, and to say that there are some places that are simply going to need more funding than others, some students for whom resources are not adequate, where in other cases they might be. We need to do that in a discussion community by community about how these things are done. And we need to make sure that everyone is paying their fair share. We’ve heard a lot in the last few months about shared sacrifice. But the actions that the Legislature has taken have really focused that sacrifice on a given group of people and said that corporations are going to get more tax breaks than they did before, and not just Wisconsin companies but multinational companies that really don’t provide a framework for our state’s economy.
The term “fair share,” of course, really means “more.” (Perhaps WEAC actually stands for “We Expect All Cash.”) It is interesting to note that even Gov. James Doyle and the previous Democrat-controlled Legislature did not endorse such proposals as increasing sales taxes for education as education groups wanted, nor has anyone with actual political power signed off on the three-decade-old proposal to take school taxes off the property tax.
Bell’s quote about “corporations are going to get more tax breaks than they did before” exposes (not that that’s a surprise) the anti-free enterprise nature of WEAC and public employee unions. The aforementioned “multinational companies that really don’t provide a framework for our state’s economy” presumably include Kraft Foods (5,000 employees in Wisconsin), Rockwell Automation (5,000), Mercury Marine (3,000), Georgia–Pacific (2,500) and Johnson Controls (2,500), among the largest private-sector employers in this state. The aforementioned “Wisconsin companies” include Menards Inc. (10,000), Marshfield Clinic (5,000), ThedaCare (5,000), Affinity Health (4,300), and Lands’ End (4,000). And yet Bell believes sticking it to business will mean more money for schools. You’d think teacher unions would want to be nice to the companies whose donations of money and employee time augment schools, but you’d apparently be wrong.
Bell also said this about teacher evaluation proposals: “Just as we don’t think that any child is described by a test score, we don’t believe that any educator is described by the kind of test scores that students get.” (Which will come as a surprise to students whose grades are indeed “described by a test score,” as many test scores as a student takes in a particular class.) Bell said student learning was “one part of what educators are to do. It’s very important, but there are lots of other factors that go into the learning in the classrooms.”
(For those who think it’s unfair to judge teachers by their students’ test scores, one potential way to fairly do that was devised in, of all places, my seventh-grade math class in the late 1970s. At the beginning of each unit, we students took a pretest, and at the end of each unit, we took a test. Our grades were determined by a combination of the final test score and by the improvement in our score from the beginning to the end of the unit. That’s how a higher test score could lead to a lower grade if there was little improvement between pretest and the last test.)
Working in higher education taught me a major difference between education and most other lines of work. Most people who work in business (and, for that matter, those who work in educational advancement or admissions) are based on results. Educators judge their work on process, which is why such terms as “pedagogy” and “rubrics,” terms not found in normal conversation, enter the atmosphere. The fact that non-teachers may not grasp that difference does not make educators superior to non-educators, particularly taxpayers and parents.
The purpose of employee evaluations is to determine an employee’s contribution to the organization and that employee’s appropriate compensation, which includes the number “zero,” as in the employee needs to work somewhere else. Any teacher evaluation process that does not weed out bad teachers is worthless to those whose taxes pay teacher salaries and benefits. If you listen to that segment, you will conclude that teacher unions want to come up with their own evaluation criteria and have no input at all from, you know, taxpayers, or even parents. (Perhaps WEAC actually stands for “We Eschew All Critiques.”)
The irony here is that teachers and taxpayers do have common ground. My example comes from southeast of Wisconsin — a 2010 Weekly Standard story about Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels:
We were having lunch one day … when a reporter from the local radio station appeared. She pressed him on the education budget cuts too. She told him the local school board had just laid off nine teachers and an administrator.
“What would you say to those people?” she asked.
He visibly flinched …
“I’d say it should have been nine administrators and one teacher. There are 20 things that school board could do before it had to lay off one teacher.”
One would think taxpayers and teacher unions could agree that every administrator in a school district that does not have the title “superintendent” (without the words “assistant” or “deputy” in front) or “principal” is a position the school district needs to rethink. School districts that in times of fiscal strain keep such administrators and lay off, or don’t hire, teachers are committing administrative and educational malpractice. (Administrator salaries are always higher than teacher salaries, so every administrator position costs the equivalent of 1.5 to 2 teacher Full Time Equivalents. On the other hand, administrators are always former teachers, so perhaps teacher unions’ looking the other way on administrator employment is another example of looking out for their own at everyone else’s expense.) Such spending scrutiny should also be applied on those school districts that maintain their own school bus fleets instead of hiring a company to provide school bus services, or other spending that is not central to a school district’s educational mission.
Bell’s interview is, to be blunt, worthy of an F grade in public relations, but I’m betting WEAC doesn’t grasp how bad this interview was for Bell or for WEAC. (Which wouldn’t be a first: A teacher I know, who is not a union activist, was genuinely shocked to find out that at least some people in his school district favored public employees’ paying more for their benefits because they had paid more for their own benefits for years.) She began by insulting those who didn’t vote for WEAC-supported candidates Nov. 2 (that is, most voters) and those who support the attempts by Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature to put reasonable controls on the billions of dollars the state sends to school districts every year. She then veered off into claiming that only education professionals can judge their own work, a rhetorical middle finger to those whose taxes pay for education professionals’ work. By the time she veered back into complaining about inadequate (by her definition) educational funding, as in Ferris Bueller’s economics class, most listeners probably had mentally checked out.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
